Enemy items are two test items that should not be presented to a candidate on the same test. Identifying enemies is essential for personnel assessment, as they weaken the measurement precision and validity of a test. In this research, we examined the effectiveness of lexical and semantic natural language processing techniques for identifying enemy…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) using neural networks has helped increase the accuracy and efficiency of scoring students' written tasks. Generally, the improved accuracy of neural network approaches has been attributed to the use of modern word embedding techniques. However, which word embedding techniques produce higher accuracy in AES systems…

Feedback is a crucial component of student learning. As advancements in technology have enabled the adoption of digital learning environments with assessment capabilities, the frequency, delivery format, and timeliness of feedback derived from educational assessments have also changed progressively. Advanced technologies powered by Artificial…

Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers methods for understanding and quantifying the similarity between written documents. Within the testing industry these methods have been used for automatic item generation, automated scoring of text and speech, modeling item characteristics, automatic question answering, machine translation, and automated…

The interpretations of test scores in secure, high-stakes environments are dependent on several assumptions, one of which is that examinee responses to items are independent and no enemy items are included on the same forms. This paper documents the development and implementation of a C#-based application that uses Natural Language Processing…

This study fit a Naïve Bayesian classifier to the words of exam items to predict the Bloom's taxonomy level of the items. We addressed five research questions, showing that reasonably good prediction of Bloom's level was possible, but accuracy varies across levels. In our study, performance for Level 2 was poor (Level 2 items were misclassified…

Automatic item generation can rapidly generate large volumes of exam items, but this creates challenges for assembly of exams which aim to include syntactically diverse items. First, we demonstrate a diminishing marginal syntactic return for automatic item generation using a saturation detection approach. This analysis can help users of automatic…